‘We have zero power' says Cork city councillor as she resigns her seat

“IN my opinion there are certain councillors for whom it is very important that councillors are perceived to have more power than they have,” Cork city councillor Fiona Ryan told The Echo after her decision to resign her seat next month.

Co-opted onto the council in 2016 after Mick Barry was elected to the Dáil, and elected in her own right in 2019, the People Before Profit/Solidarity representative said she had always sought to be “a fighting councillor embedded in the community”.

Unfortunately, she said, multiple surgeries over the past few years, a difficult pregnancy, and the reality of having an eight-month-old baby have meant she has had to rethink her role in politics.

Ms Ryan said her hope had been that she might find more hours in the day, but she had to accept that things were not likely to change significantly.

She said she planned to relinquish her seat on June 9, meaning Monday’s council meeting will be her last public meeting, and her replacement will be a socialist representative who will give a voice to working class people and challenge a system which has inequality enshrined in its heart.

“What was at the heart of how I made my decision was the question ‘What kind of a councillor do I want to be?” she said.

“There are councillors that do the job, they attend the meetings, they respond to emails, and that’s their role, but that’s not the role that I envisioned for myself and it’s not the role that I went for my community and how I would act over the coming five years.” 

She said that her hope had been that things might calm down, that she might find more hours in the day, but she said that looking into the next 12 months, she had to accept that things were not likely to change significantly.

Some councillors are happy to help perpetuate the status quo, pretending they have more power than they do, said Ms Ryan.

“They’ll say, ‘I’ll write a letter for you and help you get a house, I’ll fix the potholes, I’ll do this and that,’ and eventually the executive might follow through, in their own time, years later in fact, and the councillors will take credit, when the reality is the absence of local democracy in local authorities means that we have zero power, practically.”

Ms Ryan said she intends to remain committed to the causes which had been her primary focus during her time on the council. 

“I’m still going to be politically active in Cork City, certainly I’m not going to disappear into the ether,” she said.

Socialist TD Mick Barry, who Ms Ryan replaced in Cork City Council when he was elected to the Dáil in 2016, said his successor could take pride in her contribution on the council.

“She played the key advisory role to the Leeside Apartments residents in their successful struggle against eviction. This was the most important housing campaign seen in this city since the housing crisis began to really bite. It has key lessons for the situation we find ourselves in today.”